Elsewhere

by Gabrielle Zevin

“I said believes. No one actually needs another person or another person’s love to survive.

Love, Lizzie, is when we have irrationally convinced ourselves that we do.”

is actually very large; it only depends on your perspective.”

Liz wonders how someone could claim to love a person one minute and not love her the next.

As many have discovered, it is entirely possible (though not particularly desirable) to love two people with all your heart. It is entirely possible to long for two lives, to feel that one life can’t come close to containing it all.

“It makes me feel unwelcome.”

Liz thinks how everything is changing, all because Emily couldn’t be bothered to wash her hands properly.

“Some things we can’t see. Some things we don’t want to see,”

And she likes to start home improvement projects, but she never finishes them.

“Jen may love me, but I am not her person.

“I mean, you being here. You existing. You’re making my life so much harder,”

‘The course of true love never did run smooth,’”

What is the point of loving anyone, or even trying to love anyone? What is the point of working, or learning to park, or meeting new people? What is the point?

even if you were still on Earth, living a forward life, everything that happened to you would still have happened to someone else.”

“When you first died, I wanted to die, too. I didn’t want to be alive without you,” Emily says. “You were my whole life. I had no memories that didn’t contain you somehow.”

“I had done that before. And you were the standard against which all others had to be judged.”

“I mean, it’s all life, isn’t it? Why are you in such a rush to get back?”

fifteen years was a long time. Almost fifteen years was a gift.

If I interrupt this life, I will never know how everything was supposed to turn out. A life is a good story,

This backward life was her forward life when she really thought about it.

It isn’t her time, and she wants to know how the story—her story—will end.

“I think she felt she couldn’t have a normal life here. She wanted to be an adult. She wanted to fall in love.”

“the conditions are rarely very good anywhere, but love still happens all the time.”

If no one knows you’re alive, no one you love, you may as well be dead,

“Saying you’re through with romance is like saying you’re done with living, Betty. Life is better with a little romance, you know.”

And I love him. And when you love a person, you have to forgive him sometimes. And that’s what I think.”

If you are going to forgive a person, Liz decides, it is best to do it sooner rather than later. Later, Liz knows from experience, could be sooner than you thought.

for forgetting everything. Everything.

Oh, there are so many lives. How we wish we could live them concurrently instead of one by one by one. We could select the best pieces of each, stringing them together like a strand of pearls. But that’s not how it works. A human’s life is a beautiful mess.

she whispers in Betty’s ear, “Happiness...

Liz closes her eyes, and in a split second she chooses. Five years pass. When one is happy, time passes quickly. Liz feels as if one evening she went to bed fourteen and the next morning she woke up nine.

“You ought to read the book from end to beginning,” Owen jokes. “That way, no one dies, and it’s always a happy ending.”

“When I died, Zooey didn’t go to my funeral, so I see no need to attend her wedding.”

“Imagine! If you were forty-one, and I was twenty-one, and we still lived on Earth, we probably never would have met.”

So the wedding wasn’t exactly like she imagined it would be. But then, what in life is?

“That’s just it, Lizzie. It does barely seem worth it, unless it happens to be your wedding.”

“We can only hope, my dear. We can only hope.” Curtis crosses his fingers.

At the bride’s request, no flowers are harmed for the union.

But Liz doesn’t cry. She’s too happy to cry. Two of her favorite people in the world are getting married, and that doesn’t happen every day.

Just feels like all the unimportant stuff is falling away.

For better or for worse, this is my life, she thinks. This is my life. My life.

Sadie becomes a dot, then a speck, then nothing at all.

“What I am is a mix of scared, happy, and excited, I think.”

“It’s such a terribly dangerous thing being a baby when you think about it. So much can go wrong.”

“I know,” he says, “because I choose to believe it is so.”

“As I’ve come to see it, my life would have been either here or elsewhere anyway,”

“Is that a joke?” Amadou asks. “If it amuses you, it is.” Liz laughs a little.

“A life isn’t measured in hours and minutes. It’s the quality, not the length.

“You get older, you get younger, and I’m not sure the difference is as great as I once thought.

from some other plan for the way the world should be,” said Jesse. “Some plan that didn’t work out too good. And so everything was changed.